Citadel

Product Information

And as a cell of Maquis resistance fighters, codenamed CITADEL, fight for everything they hold dear, their struggle will reveal an older, darker combat being fought in the shadows. Some might suggest that Citadel's ending is shocking, but I did suspect about 75 pages prior to the book's conclusion how Mosse would complete her story. That started to change around chapter 37, when the major love story started to develop and Sandrine begins to grow up and understand the harsher truths about the war.

If I had found several spelling mistakes and multiple erroneous attempts at a semi-colon I would not have been surprised. Citadel is probably best described as a 'time-slip' story, with the main part of the novel set in France during the German occupation in 1942 - 1944. Twisted facts entirely for her own purposes and played God with history to such an extent that nothing can be said to be even vaguely based on what was really occurring during this epoch. Worse still, rather than using language effectively and describing, the novel is often one long stream of dialogue after another. However, rather than simply dealing with this, Mosse chooses to interweave the most ludicrous plot about a Codex.

And when she meets Raoul, they discover a shared passion for the cause, for their homeland, and for each other. I do wish I'd known that Kate Mosse weaves the supernatural in to all her books before I started reading this. I've had this sitting on my library wishlist for ages, not knowing if I should re-read it, as I didn't want to spoil my happy memories of having devoured it the first time round. Revelation 1:1 announces both the book's title (it is a 'revelation') and its divine author ('Jesus Christ').

And I didn’t get much from the spiritual storyline that attempts to unite Arinius’ experience with that of Sandrine and her contemporaries. Sandrine is shocked out of her innocence in the summer of 1942 when her life is saved by a young resistance fighter, Raoul Pelletier, just as he discovers that his network has been infiltrated by a spy, Leo Authié, working for the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency.He had no particular destination in mind, only that he had to find somewhere distinctive and sheltered, somewhere where the pattern of the ridges and crests might retain their shape for centuries to come… Forests might be cut down or burn or drowned when a river bursts its banks. This mixture of Nazis, ancient Christian artefacts and the supernatural is more than a little reminiscent of the Indiana Jones franchise, and Otto Rahn, the real-life medievalist turned SS officer who is said to have been the inspiration for George Lucas's films, is even referred to in the novel. Up until that point, the hunt for Arinius’ Codex had been pleasantly archaeological, reminding me of the conspiratorial tones of Eco and Ruiz Zafón. Packed with some terrifyingly realistic action scenes, portraying the horrors of war and the evil that men can do to each other, it is also at times, gentle and down-to-earth - portraying the small French town and it's folk with incredible realism.

But smuggling refugees over the mountains into neutral territory and sabotaging their Nazi occupiers is only part of their mission.In short, making it to the end, felt like a Herculanean struggle and one which I would not inflict on anyone. their hearts burn with passion, there is much gazing at the stars, there is a Jewish lover, who is, of course taken and so and so on. She has a particular knack for creating vivid action scenes — the blood, debris and panic of a bomb attack, or a skirmish – but she describes with equal precision the small, daily hardships of life under occupation: the endless paperwork, the difficulties of communication, the twitching curtains next door. But I kept wondering when the real story would start and when I would actually learn something about what kind of book this was.

So I was very excited to get Kate Mosse’s new book, ‘Citadel’, which is a lovely, big, thick thwack of a book. It just seemed so unnecessary and daft as the culmination of its appearance was unsatisfactory and confusing.

It was as if she was holding back on this because ultimately she thought she might need them to change sides later, but wasn't quite sure so just left them in an ambiguous zone that was unhelpful and eventually served no purpose. Historical fiction has never been my first love, and I'll admit that the first of the series; Labyrinth, sat on my shelf for a long time before I actually read it. Interwoven with the fictionalized story of these courageous women, led by 18-year-old Sandrine Vidal, is the story of a 4th century monk seeking refuge in the town, carrying with him a Codex the Church wanted destroyed to stifle the power of its words. Well, I had read 'Labyrinth' which I really enjoyed and 'Sepulcher,' which was also relatively enjoyable as far as light holiday reads go.